


Water

by machine_dove



Series: Mirror [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Abuse of Greek Mythology, Abuse of Norse mythology, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Fairy Tale Elements, Finally, Happy Ending, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-04
Updated: 2015-12-04
Packaged: 2018-05-04 20:04:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5346848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/machine_dove/pseuds/machine_dove
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky’s mind was chaos, full of sharp-edged shards of memories and echoes of fragmented nonsense, but among the discord there were two things he held on to, the rocks upon which he would rebuild his shattered identity.  First, that his mission was, and had always been, Steve Rogers - not to terminate, but to protect, to guard, to defend.  Second, that he would track down every single member of the organization that had shaped him into a weapon and pointed him at Steve and destroy them, show them just how terrifying the Winter Soldier could truly be.  They could run, they could hide, but there would be no escape.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Water

**Author's Note:**

> A thousand thanks to [Sproings](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Sproings/pseuds/Sproings) and [Kalibear](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Kalibear/pseuds/Kalibear) for being amazing inspirations and betas, you're the absolute best!

Bucky’s mind was chaos, full of sharp-edged shards of memories and echoes of fragmented nonsense, but among the discord there were two things he held on to, the rocks upon which he would rebuild his shattered identity.  First, that his mission was, and had always been, Steve Rogers - not to terminate, but to protect, to guard, to defend.  Second, that he would track down every single member of the organization that had shaped him into a weapon and pointed him at Steve and destroy them, show them just how terrifying the Winter Soldier could truly be.  They could run, they could hide, but there would be no escape.

He started by hitting a HYDRA safehouse.  If he was going to do this, he needed intel and supplies.  Despite the risk, he took the time to clean off the worst of the Potomac river slime and pulled some less conspicuous clothes over his body armor and his distinctive metal arm.  Supplies came next - a couple of burner phones, a tablet, cash.  There wasn’t much else he could make use of, so he destroyed the rest and left the area, careful to avoid notice.  

The city was chaos, roads clogged with cars either coming or going, and all mass-transit had been shut off in the wake of the helicarrier crash.  He made his way to a coffeeshop where the news was playing, just one more face in the crowd with nowhere else to go, trying to get details on this latest disaster.  The free wifi helped, and he set to work downloading what he thought were the most important files out of the mass that the Black Widow had released.  There was just...so much.  And most of the sites and safehouses he found referenced in the files were third tier at best, known to more than a few key individuals and easily sacrificed.  He knew that there were others, more important, where the significant research and irreplaceable artifacts were kept - knew, because he had once counted among those, the ghost, the killer, the secret knife in the dark, kept a secret within the inner circle of HYDRA.  He had been there, all those secret places, but that didn’t mean he remembered where they were.  His frustration grew as he grasped for memories that danced and flashed like fish in the sun, there and gone before he could make sense of the shape of them.

The shop had gotten more crowded since he first sat down, packed with people desperate for information.  An old woman caught his eye, clearly beyond exhausted and barely able to hold herself up with her cane.  The crowd buffeted her, and she swayed dangerously.  

Bucky caught her arm before he could consciously process his action, guided her over to his seat.  His coffee had long since gone cold.  He cleared his throat nervously.

“Here, uh, my seat.  You can sit here.”

“You’re a good boy, thank you.”  She sagged with exhaustion as she sat, pulling a small ball of yarn out of her purse.

“Can I.  Um.  Can I get you something to drink?”

“Oh no, that’s not necessary.  I was going to go straight home after my appointment, but the trains stopped running.  Terrible business, that.”

Bucky ducked his head, not entirely sure how to respond.  “I’m just going to.  Um.  Go now?”

She grabbed his arm, and he forced himself to freeze rather than lash out as his instincts demanded.  “You’re so kind, thank you again.  Please, take this.  You should go see the exhibit, it’s worth the time.”  

He took the paper she pushed into his hand, the left one, and hurried away, oddly unsettled.  Her face was lined with age, but her eyes?  Those had been much, much older.  The sound of her scissors slicing through the yarn followed him, impossibly clear despite the noise of the crowd.

As he left the shop he looked at what she had given him.  It was a flyer for a museum exhibit at the Smithsonian, one about Captain America and the Howling Commandos.  

Looking at the picture, he felt restless, uneasy, and before he realized it he was heading towards the National Mall and the Air & Space Museum.  

“Intel,” he thought to himself.  “Gathering information.  It’s a logical next step.”  He tried not to think about how it sounded like he was trying to convince himself.

 

 

* * *

The crowds were less here, not many interested in sightseeing among the relics of the past when history was being written in stone and fire and twisted metal just outside.  That was good, because the noise and the chaos and the aching confusion grew with each carefully preserved uniform, each age-yellowed letter and scattered bit of ephemera from a life that might have been a dream, half-formed memories wavering like a mirage.  The films were almost worse, to see a face that he knew only from the mirror wearing expressions that felt like masks when he tried them on.  

The other - the Captain, the target,  _Steve_ \- was almost worse.  He could see blue when he looked at him, the blue of his eyes, the blue of his lips when he died, the blue of his uniform when he emerged from the flames reborn like a phoenix.  He knew that quirk of his lips, the sound of his laugh, the feel of his chest as he struggled to breathe.

And then too he knew the bite of the straps, the burn of the wipe, and the cold, dry air of the HYDRA base in Slorenia where he had spent so many years.

 

 

* * *

The mountains were the same, tall and craggy, and the people were the same as well, angry and scared and divided on fracture lines of race and religion that had been exploited and widened further by HYDRA in their quest for chaos, and control, and power.

Bucky moved through the crowds like a native, dress and body language neutral enough to render him practically invisible in the crowds.  His mission had gone well - better than well.  Three HYDRA bases were gone, stripped of data and razed to the ground, personnel killed before they could even attempt to make contact with anyone else.  The fires would alert what remained of HYDRA that two of the bases had been destroyed, but the third was a dark site, underground, with no regular contact with the outside to reduce the risk of discovery.  It could be weeks or months until they discovered its loss, and considering what they had stored there that loss would cut deep.

He allowed himself a smile, the satisfied look of a predator after a successful hunt.  Most of the data had been sent to Steve and the Widow, through a series of proxies that even she would need time to trace back, and he would be long gone by then.  They would know what to do with it, those names and lists of HYDRA personnel and places.  He had work of his own still to do here, safehouses to render unsafe and caches to empty, but he was still unclear on where he should go next, his uncertain memory of other key sites still foggy and clouded.

He purchased a glass of sbiten and sat to consider his next move.  A woman sat next to him, in her middle years, her dress traditional and declaring her to be one of the Dudake people.

“Beautiful weather, yes?” she asked pulling out a spindle.  Bucky nodded, silent, which did nothing to discourage her.  “I love days like this, out on the mountain.  I feel like I can see forever.”  Her fingers moved as she spoke, drafting out the wool and creating thread that was impossibly fine and impossibly strong.  The spindle whirled, mesmerizing in its regularity.

Bucky was silent, and finished his drink.  She grabbed at his sleeve as he stood to leave.

“You dropped this, young one.”

He frowned as he looked at the paper she held out.  “I didn’t -”

“This is yours,” she insisted, and he found himself moving to take it.

When he opened it he was assaulted by a vision of headstones, the thick scent of graveyard dirt, and the suffocating silence in his chest on the day he buried his heart.  Impossible,  _impossible!_  His memory was flawed and unreliable, but he knew that Steve was alive, knew it like he knew the pressure of a trigger, the smell of gunpowder, and the satisfaction of a perfect shot.  Knew it like he knew his heart still beat, knew it because his heart still beat.

The paper in his hand was crumpled now, and he opened it, metal fingers shaking as hard as his flesh ones now.  It was numbers, lists of numbers that came into focus more slowly than they should have as coordinates, coordinates that he knew as soon as he saw them, the location where the Eastern Head of HYDRA made her home.

He turned like a snake, seeking out the woman who had given him this, but she was gone, vanished more impossibly than even the Winter Soldier could have managed.

Her eyes haunted him.

 

 

* * *

The Brass Monkey was a shithole, and had always been a shithole.  That much at least was comforting in its predictability when so much else in Madripoor had changed from his memories, flashes of decadent luxury interspersed with haunting poverty, and blood, always blood.  

Life was cheap in Madripoor, if you had enough money and not enough humanity.

Bucky had access to more than enough money to buy the weapons and explosives he needed to root out every hint of HYDRA he had found in the city, and enough humanity to want to drink away the pain when he thought about the collateral damage his mission had accumulated.  Part of his brain was detailing acceptable loss and successful mission completion, while the rest - an ever-growing part - grieved, and wished he had been able to find another way.

He had tried, paid off a small army of street kids to clear the tenement that sat on top of one of the HYDRA nests, but that still meant that all those people had lost everything - homes, mementos, everything but their lives.

He knew the feeling.

It was a goddamned shame that whiskey didn’t do a goddamned thing, not to dull the hurt and not to wash away the blood on his hands.  He should have been gone hours ago, after he set off enough fireworks both literal and metaphorical to make it abundantly clear to anyone who was looking exactly where in the world he was, after he had sent the data he found to Steve and the Widow, but he found himself unaccountably frozen in place, unsure of where he wanted to be and unwilling to move until he had decided.

A woman, almost too young to have earned the word and sharply modern in the way the best parts of the city were, was knitting on the stool next to him.  She slid a drink his way.

“That one doesn’t look like it’s agreeing with you.  Maybe you’ll like this one better.”

He picked it up with a shrug.  If she had drugged it she’d only be disappointed, and it wasn’t like it could be worse than the whiskey had been.  He threw it back in one swallow, savoring the burn.

The burn continued, settling into his chest like a burning ember and making every beat of his heart echo through his skull.  He couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, but in his head he was screaming as the fog in his head and his memories and reality itself shattered.

“STEVE!” he screamed as he remembered how thin and cold his heart had been when he died.

“STEVE!” he screamed again as he remembered a different time, a different life, a different cold and empty eternity.

“STEVE!” he screamed for a third and final time as he weighed the trade he had made, the blood and the pain and the guilt against his heart, alive and warm and beating, and knew that despite the cost and despite the pain and despite the shame, he would make the same choice again and again and again.

He could hear sounds around him, shouting and chaos and a deep, familiar voice, but he was lost too deeply in himself to make out the words.

And then his heart lurched and there were warm arms around him and blue eyes and Steve was there and was saying that he was never, ever going to lose him again, and it was everything, everything Bucky had ever needed or wanted, and nothing he deserved, but he was going to hold on to it with everything he had because he knew what it felt like to lose it and he could never, ever bear to lose it again.

So he stood, and he held Steve close, and he kissed him as he had always wanted to do, and his heart was alive, alive, alive and in his arms again as he should have always been.  He held him close and whispered against his lips, “I’m never losing you again.”

In the corner, a woman smiled, three women smiled, and they whispered in one voice, “It is done.”

**Author's Note:**

> This little series may be the hardest thing I've ever written, and I want to thank everybody who took the time to read or leave comments. It means a lot, thank you!


End file.
